


Separated by a Common Language

by Teddywolf, tigerbright



Category: Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille - Steven Brust, Dragaera - Steven Brust
Genre: Gen, Humanity, POV First Person, Stream of Consciousness, Technobabble, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 18:35:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17105978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teddywolf/pseuds/Teddywolf, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerbright/pseuds/tigerbright
Summary: Morrolan takes a broad view of the term "human"; Vlad does not. They take a lunch break.





	Separated by a Common Language

**Author's Note:**

  * For [james](https://archiveofourown.org/users/james/gifts).



> My husband Teddywolf gets credited post-reveal as Main Editor because the setting was his idea. For purpose of notifications, I have added him as an author.
> 
> One of my dearest friends, Mark A. Mandel of the late lamented Cracks and Shards website, was my beta reader.
> 
> Many thanks also to the maintainers of the Lyorn Records on Wikia.

I am young (for a Dragon) and I know things that make others uncomfortable.

No-one was surprised when I stood in the ruins of my father’s castle and declared that I had come home. Indeed, they had been worried that they would have to tell me themselves. Building Castle Black gave me joy and united, for a time, those who called themselves humans. If such expectations of harmony make me naive, so be it. My greatest pleasures are introducing disciplines and people to one another and seeing the results, and I shall not give that up.

I am not blind to prejudice, which can, and does, of course, get in the way. Raised in the East, I learned to hold my temper, a fact that disquiets all those who have certain expectations of Dragonlords. My friend Teldra is considered inscrutable by some humans for the most ridiculous of reasons, namely, that they cannot conceive of two people overseeing one realm (that is, Castle Black and, indirectly, Southmoor) so closely who are not related to one another. Indeed, even were we so inclined, a Dragon cannot take an Issola as their official partner.

But this is all beside the point of this story.

One day, not long (even as Eastern humans count time) after Vlad Taltos had brought Aliera e’Kieron and myself through the Paths of the Dead -- which was itself long after Verra had claimed us both -- I had occasion to hire Vlad as my security consultant. That this resulted in a closer friendship was not objectionable to me, though it certainly puzzled Vlad. 

It should be said that Vlad, though not generally prejudiced, could not refer to humans like myself as humans, but rather chose to call us, collectively, Dragaerans. I preferred this epithet to his Noish-pa’s condescending “elfs” and did not object. Indeed, I did not object even when Vlad was clearly trying to needle me.

Unlike most, being Vlad, he got in a subtle dig at me every time, regardless of reaction.

Today was no different; we were arguing about humanity. Eastern humans, from whom Vlad is descended, insist that those who have been altered by the Jenoine are elves and fairies, and they have the legends and history that seem to prove it. Dragaeran humans like myself, who can live for thousands of years, tend to view Eastern humans as primitive. 

We are both wrong, of course, as was my argument, but Vlad can be narrow-minded and does tend to get his teeth into the subject. We were getting absolutely nowhere. 

“Dinner,” I said firmly. Vlad looked surprised. “I’m hungry and need a change of scenery,” I explained. “So not here.”

“So?”  
“Window.” He groaned.

“There’s a soup with dumplings and garlic that you’ll like.”

“FINE.”

We went. I saw Vlad read the sign -- Cowboy Feng’s -- with apparent incomprehension. 

“Local slang,” I said cheerfully. “Come along.”

The room was decorated with garish murals, including one of humans in odd outfits attacking one another. There was a group in the corner with stringed instruments and some odd equipment that apparently provided amplification. They were pretty good - the bowed instrument was light yet rich, and the plucked instruments were surprisingly loud. Periodically they would pause for a conversation between a farmer and a traveler. They seemed young and tired, and more like Easterners than Dragaerans, and definitely also human. They made no notice of us, even though Vlad was, as usual, carting around a poisonous (not that they would have known that) winged lizard on his shoulder, tail casually draped behind Vlad’s head and over the opposite shoulder.

“Wait,” said Vlad, “I’ve heard these jokes before.”

“Anyone who knows a farmer has heard these jokes before,” laughed the host, who bustled us off to a table in the corner. “What’ll it be?”

I turned to Vlad. He shrugged. “Do you have anything with garlic? Fish? Kethna?”

She paused for a moment. “Kethna?”

Vlad sighed, and asked for the daily special, and the chicken soup with dumplings, made from something called matzo. There was plenty of garlic and salt in the soup, and the dense balls had absorbed the soup fairly thoroughly. 

Vlad’s eyes lit up at the special of the day, a sliced spiced meat wrapped in a thick steaming flatbread. It seemed to be enveloped in onions and peppers.

“Okay,” he said. “Where are we?”

I pointed to the musicians. “Ask them?”

They had gone on to another song about wild rovers. Vlad waited politely before wandering over. I listened with half an ear. Vlad brought them back to our table.

“Morrolan,” Vlad said, without preamble, “they’re skipping around space and time because of artificially created amorphia.”

A giggle sounded in a corner. The little brown-haired girl sitting there put her finger to her lips, so I looked away. Vlad’s jhereg shifted back and forth on his shoulder.

“Well, to be more specific, because we keep getting attacked by weapons that turn things to radioactive slag,” one of the musicians told us. He introduced himself as Billy. “Certainly they make other things around them radioactive, but they aren’t the raw chaos that Vlad here is describing.”

We talked in that vein for a while. I was fascinated. Amorphia that wasn’t amorphia, that continued to kill slowly after the initial cataclysm, that had no way of being shaped by the mind (not that Vlad really knew anything about it being shaped by the mind), but merely pushed behind a shield. It seemed fairly useless. Billy looked a little miffed, muttering about supercolliders, but Rose agreed. She was tired of being shunted around the universe like a pool ball. (Vlad asked what pool balls were, and the group moved to some large wooden tables at the back of the room, each with a pit in the middle, the floor of which was covered with green cloth. I could see Vlad considering how to move the game to Adrilankha. I expect that the jhereg was taking notes.) 

Despite the animated conversation, Vlad was looking worried, and the abstracted look he gets when talking to the jhereg was concerning as well. 

“How soon can we go back?” he asked me.

I raised an eyebrow. I was in no hurry myself, but I was surprised by how long it had taken Vlad to notice the passage of time.

“Look--” he gestured around the room “--they’re telling me that the bar travels in time, that they’ve given up trying to figure it out except on a moment-to-moment basis, as the number of verses in a song or the time it takes to convert a chicken to stock. There’s no connection to the Orb here. So how are we going to get back? What time will it be when we get there? What year will it be when we get there?” 

_How on earth will he ever get Sethra Lavode to explain amorphia to him? He’s going to need that._

I shrugged. “It’s a magic portal. When do you want to get back?”

In the end, after much discussion, we decided on “about half an hour” to make it believable that we’d only gone out for lunch. Vlad promptly sat down with the jhereg and they methodically tried every dish on the menu, which prompted a discussion of coinage (they accepted Imperial coins, after weighing them, and decided that three would cover the whole shot, or bill, as they called it) and a comparison between kethna bacon and the bacon provided by the restaurant, which seemed to come in two styles. 

“Ready?” I asked, finally, when I deemed it possible that I could have read two of Paarfi’s histories in the time we had been talking.

Vlad nodded. “Ready.”

We went through the Window just in time -- we heard an immense wave of sound and felt as though a giant hand had pushed us through, and when we looked out from the tower, there was a blinding light as though we were looking into the Furnace, and Feng’s was gone. I quickly closed the portal, deciding that I did not want “radioactivity” contaminating my experiments, much less my castle.

Vlad stood up from where he had fallen to the floor. His jhereg, which had flown carefully but swiftly and repeatedly around the room, was clearly upset. We both checked the Orb for time. 

“Thanks,” Vlad said. “Literally food for thought.”

I smiled. “Same time next week?”

**Author's Note:**

> "Arkansas Traveler"  
> \- with silly stories, as performed by Pete Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJcMSmJaww4  
> \- another fun version that probably fits the Cowboy Feng's group better: https://youtu.be/PB3tSSlq130
> 
> "Wild Rovers"  
> \- as done by the Dropkick Murphys, BECAUSE. https://youtu.be/IQb9rf7QSLg
> 
> Prompts for including Cowboy Feng's and Devera, and fixing continuity errors, came from the husband.


End file.
